Extradition of Julian Assange Threatens Us All

MEMORANDUM FOR: The governments and people of the United Kingdom and
the United StatesFROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPs)SUBJECT: Extradition of Julian Assange Threatens Us All

On April 11, London police forcibly removed WikiLeaks co-founder Julian
Assange from the embassy of Ecuador after that country’s president, Lenin Moreno,
abruptly revoked his predecessor’s grant
of asylum. The United States government immediately requested Assange’s
extradition for prosecution under a charge
of “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” under the Computer Fraud and Abuse
Act (CFAA).

Others found reason for concern in the details of the indictment. Carie DeCel,
a staff attorney for the Knight
First Amendment Institute, noted that the indictment goes beyond simply
stating the computer intrusion charge and “includes many
more allegations that reach more broadly into typical journalistic practices,
including communication with a source, encouraging a source to share information,
and protecting a source.”

In an analysis of the indictment’s implications, the Project on Government
Oversight (POGO) observed that it includes an allegation that “Assange and Manning
took measures to conceal Manning as the source of the disclosure…including
by removing usernames from the disclosed information and deleting chat logs
between Assange and Manning,” and that they “used a special folder on a cloud
drop box of WikiLeaks to transmit classified records.”

“These are not only legitimate but professionally advised journalistic practices
for source protection,” notes POGO. It is worth noting that Manning had Top
Secret clearance and did not need Assange’s assistance to gain access
to databases, but only to hide her identity.

The indictment’s implied threat thus reaches beyond Assange and even beyond
journalists. The threat to journalists and others does not vanish if they subsequently
avoid practices identified in the government’s indictment. The NSA’s big bag
of past communications offers abundant material from which to spin an indictment
years later, and even circumstantial evidence can produce a conviction. Moreover,
the secret landscape – a
recent and arbitrary development – continually expands, making ever
more of government off limits to public view.

When politician and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo labeled
WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service,” he was describing
the oft-stated duty
of newspapers, “to comfort the afflicted, and to afflict the comfortable.”

The Devil in the Big Picture

One can look so closely at the indictment details that one misses the big picture
and with it vital truths. Standing back for a broader view, a long-running campaign
of harassment by US authorities and former officials focused on WikiLeaks’
publication of embarrassing secrets becomes visible. The Project on Government
Oversight observes:

“Even if the motives for Assange’s indictment are entirely legitimate, the
litany of high-ranking government officials who called for Assange to be prosecuted
for publishing classified documents have likely already irreparably harmed the
freedom of the press. It will be virtually impossible to fully disentangle the
government’s desire to prosecute Assange for his publishing activities from
the government’s current prosecution of him, and as a result there will to some
degree be an unavoidable chilling effect stemming from his prosecution.”

Standing back still further, a crowd of similar cases comes into view: other
truth tellers subjected to similar persecution. These are not journalists but
another species of truth teller – national security whistleblowers
– who have warned for years that this day would come.

A Pattern of Reprisal

Opinions
of Julian Assange’s character and methods vary wildly but what is relevant to
First Amendment
freedoms is how the US government perceives him. The big picture reveals that
Assange, a publisher of whistleblower disclosures, is viewed the same way as
whistleblowers: unwelcome lights shining on official wrongdoing who must be
dimmed, deflected and shut off. What government bodies are doing to Assange
they routinely have done to whistleblowers – Thomas Drake, Jeffrey Sterling,
John Kiriakou, Thomas Tamm, William Binney, Daniel
Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning and others – who disclosed for public benefit
information the government finds politically troublesome.

Once the government develops animus toward a truth teller, it fishes indefinitely
until it finds some means to retaliate – some pretext
to punish that individual. A pattern of retaliation against high-profile national
security whistleblowers includes the following tactics:

pretrial declarations of guilt from influential officials, such as Barack
Obama’s declaration
(as the military’s Commander-in-Chief) that Army Private Bradley (now Chelsea)
Manning “broke the law” – potentially influencing the Army court that
heard her case.

a Balkanized judicial process that restricts most such cases to one judicial
venue cherry-picked by prosecutors for speedy
deference to government, a venue sealed off from public scrutiny and,
some say, justice;

prosecution under the Espionage
Act, a “vague” and “draconian” law, similar in those respects to the CFAA;

continuing persecution – isolation, marginalization, blacklisting,
and more – after time has been served (see here
and here)
or after charges
are dropped.

Reportedly, British and U.S. intelligence are interrogating Assange, possibly
employing torture tactics, without access to legal counsel at a prison reserved
for terrorists. US officials apparently charged Assange as
“a terrorist” in order to dodge the problem of the statute of
limitations for conspiracy or computer intrusion by extending (via the Patriot
Act and/or other terrorism laws) the normal statute of limitations from 5 to
8 years.

Not for Insiders

Even if charges against a whistleblower are later dropped, governments still
win because the tactics used damage the truth teller professionally,
financially, socially and psychologically,
and foreseeably chill
other whistleblowers.

Importantly, virtually all of the retaliatory actions described above are carried
out or instigated by the elite political establishment – current and former
political appointees and elected officials. Equally important is the fact that
tactics used against whistleblowers are rarely if ever applied to political
insiders who fail to protect classified information. Even actual
spies who give or sell secrets directly to foreign governments have fared
better than some well-meaning whistleblowers. In contrast to whistleblowers,
political insiders who mistreat government secrets are publicly praised
by the establishment, face lesser
charges (if any), are treated
with dignity by investigators, receive presidential pardons
and move on to prestigious and lucrative
positions.

The Takeaway

Retaliation against Julian Assange over the past decade plus replicates a pattern
of ruthless political retaliation against whistleblowers, in particular
those who reveal truths hidden by illegal
secrecy. U.S. law
prohibits classifying information “in order to conceal inefficiency, violations
of law, or administrative error; to prevent embarrassment to a person, organization,
or agency.”

Whether U.S. authorities successfully prosecute Assange, accept a desperate
plea deal or keep him tied up with endless litigation, they will succeed in
sending the same chilling message to all journalists that they send to potential
whistleblowers: Do not embarrass us or we’ll punish you – somehow,
someday, however long it takes. In that respect, one could say damage to journalism
already has been done but the battle is not over.

This extension of a whistleblower reprisal regime onto a publisher of disclosures
poses an existential threat to all journalists and to the right of all people
to speak and hear important truths. The US indictment of Julian Assange tests
our ability to perceive a direct threat to free speech, and tests our will to
oppose that threat. Without freedom of press and the right and willingness to
publish, whistleblowers even disclosing issues of grave, life and death public
safety, will be like a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear.

The great American writer Henry David Thoreau wrote, “It takes two to
speak the truth–one to speak and one to hear.” Today, it takes three
to speak the truth–one to speak, one to hear, and one to defend the first
two in court. If the US Government has its way, there will be no defense, no
truth.

For the Steering Groups of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
and Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence:

Robert Wing, former US Department of State Foreign Service
Officer (Associate VIPs)

Ann Wright, US Army Reserve Colonel (ret) and former US Diplomat
who resigned in 2003 in opposition to the Iraq War

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPs) is made up of former
intelligence officers, diplomats, military officers and congressional staffers.
The organization, founded in 2002, was among the first critics of Washington’s
justifications for launching a war against Iraq. VIPS advocates a US foreign
and national security policy based on genuine national interests rather than
contrived threats promoted for largely political reasons. An archive of VIPS
memoranda is available at Consortiumnews.com.
Reprinted from Consortium News with
permission.